Top Three Benefits of Creating a Team Brand
Your team’s brand is its reputation and how the rest of the company views it and every team or department in an organization already has one. Consider your team’s current standing in the company. Do other teams and departments consider it reliable? Slow? Unavailable? The answer to that is your team’s current brand.
Molding your company’s perception of your team is just as beneficial as focusing on their image of you as an individual.
Creating a team brand follows the same process as creating a company or personal brand. The first step to this is defining the brand. This isn’t the sole job for a leader, however. Together the team should define their brand. This ensures the entire team is on board and can deliver on its brand promise. The work continues after the team brand is determined; individually and collectively, every team member must work to embody the brand. To hold the team accountable to its branding, as a leader you can announce the new branding to other departments.
Every step of creating a brand brings its own benefits to your team.
Learn how to use the company brand to attract better talent
Team Branding Builds Strengths & Improves Weaknesses
The team strengths define what your team brand is going to deliver; while the team weaknesses determine what your team will become. Say you lead a team that sees themselves as great problem solvers but lack when it comes to communicating. Within the organization, your team can continue to grow its reputation or brand as problem solvers through helping other departments. Internal branding work within the team can then be focused on improving communication like being more responsive.
Eventually, being responsive and communicative will become second nature to your team, turning a weakness into a habit. This then leaks into the team’s branding making your team known as problem solving communicators and acting as such.
By allowing your team to define their own brand and how they want to be seen using their own strengths and weaknesses, your team not only improves its reputation among their coworkers, it also helps identify where they feel they need to improve the most and give them the opportunity to do so.
Working together toward personifying their self-appointed team brand brings the department together in another way.
Delivering Brand Promises Realigns Departmental Goals & Encourages Teamwork
It’s easy for individual team members to get lost in day-to-day tasks and lose focus of the larger goals at hand. Defining and creating a team brand and then working toward living up to that is a team effort. Working together toward delivering on the team brand unites a team around a shared purpose creating a renewed commitment to the department.
When working in accordance with a team brand, each member is held individually responsible for the perception of the team overall. This creates connection among team members and affects the way team members work with each other. Using the same example of a problem-solving team of communicators, let’s say some of those same team members are deadline driven but slightly careless while others are detail oriented but slower. These team members can work together to help compensate for each other’s work habits that aren’t in line with the brand.
A more cohesive, focused team environment results in something of even greater value, a more productive and higher performing workforce.
Creating A Team Brand Improves Production & Accountability
Being responsible for representing the team brand not only encourages teamwork, it holds employees more accountable for their work. This accountability results in improved productivity and efficiency.
With team branding, accountability isn’t just the expectation that assignments are completed but they are done so in line with the team brand. Within the team, members hold each other accountable for ensuring the work produced meets their own expectations. The rest of the organization then holds your entire team accountable for delivering work in line with its brand promise. The result of this is your team producing results that maintain the team’s reputation or brand, individually and as a group.
Let’s take another look at the example of the team that branded itself communicative problem-solvers. This team has created an image for itself that it resolves issues, but let’s say some team members skirt problems rather than tackle them head on. Under the team brand, those employees who previously passed on problem solving tactics now must find resolutions to stay on brand. The team identity encourages them to work harder and more productively. In the same example, team members previously saddled with problem solving for others in the department now also have more time to focus on their own assignments.
The accountability that comes with team branding goes beyond increased productivity. It also ensures the work being produced by your team is of a certain quality. In this way, accountability through team branding promotes increased productivity.
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Conclusion
Like the company brand or even your personal brand, a team’s brand represents the instinctive reaction people have when your team comes to mind. When a team brand is assigned, everyone in the department must do their part to ensure they’re delivering on that brand. Doing so has the benefits of improving the team’s connectedness, performance and provides opportunities to improve upon the skills it lacks. There’s a difference between creating and talking about a team brand and being about the team brand, however. Accountability plays a major role in ensuring your team delivers and comes with its own benefits. When a team successfully plans and carries out its own brand strategy it’s more than their workflow as a team that improves; the transformation is noticed by the company as a whole and your team not only becomes one that embodies its brand, but one that affects positive changes. The benefits of team branding don’t just affect your team, either. As the manager or supervisor leading the charge, your contributions and leadership will be noted too.
Harness Data & Analytics With Teramind
Empowering your team to be more focused, decisive and productive is no easy task. Managers and team leads need clear metrics to manage their teams efficiently, but all of the data can be overwhelming. Teramind fills the missing gap in existing employee monitoring solutions by translating raw tracking data into meaningful metrics that can help you make data-driven decisions.
But don’t just take our word for it…
